A cancelled GTA V expansion may have sent Trevor to Paris

A read of the recent GTA V leak has added a detail to a story expansion that never shipped. In one mission, the files suggest, Trevor could have ended up in Paris — the first time in many years the series looked beyond the United States. Rockstar is already pushing to take down videos of the material, but fans had time to look at part of the archive.

Back in 2013 the studio said the fifth game would get story expansions, and the first was expected in 2014. None of them came out. The priority became GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption 2. The cancelled Trevor branch cast him as something like a contractor for the government, with jobs that included taking out powerful targets. That outline was already known. Paris is the new piece.

The files include an unfinished level: an expensive apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower. The tower itself is still a flat image outside the playable area, so this is not proof of a whole city. The flat may have been for a cutscene or a single mission, an assassination for example. How big the trip was meant to be is unknown. The last time the series took the player abroad was in 1999, in GTA: London 1969.

Dan Houser later explained the caution in plain terms: the franchise is tied so tightly to American life, guns and stock images that a game set somewhere else risked no longer feeling like GTA. Steven Ogg had already filmed a few scenes for the expansion before it stopped. Former senior camera artist Joe Rubino has said the project was about half done when it was cancelled. After the online mode launched, a separate story was hard to justify, because the network was where the money was. Some of the work does seem to have reached GTA Online later, including The Doomsday Heist.